Sitting in the office of Slievenamon Agricultural Services and chatting to Richie, John and Martin White they all agree that, to keep a contracting business profitable, you need to have output, but even more important is efficiency. For instance, last season the firm invested in its first tri-axle silage trailer, a 50m³, 7.6m long Redrock. For every two loads of silage the triaxle delivered to the clamp, the firm’s tandem-axle trailers would have to do three to move the same tonnage. On the same theme, today’s machinery fleet is chalk and cheese compared to what they started out with, and all three brothers will nod in agreement when Richie says: “It was all hard got.”
Wind the clock back, and it was their father Pat who started doing hire work in the late 1960’s as a way of earning a living alongside the traditionally small farm near Drangan in County Tipperary. Pit silage was added to the list of jobs in 1973 with the arrival of a Kidd double chop and by 1990s there was a Hesston self-propelled doing the chopping accompanied by a fleet of mainly Zetor and Deutz-Fahr tractors.
As Richie says: “It was no different from anywhere else, it was a small silage outfit doing a bit of muck spreading and a bit of tillage work, round baling and hedge cutting in the late 1980s. Farm sizes were very small, especially compared with today. Even as young lads we were involved. We grew up with this, we have always been involved. In 1996 we formed SAS, which is short for Slievenamon Agricultural Services, as our father was retiring and we wanted to stay contracting. John trained as a plant fitter and Martin as a metal fabricator, and they did that for around eight years.”
John adds:
